Welcome to the first part of a 2-part tutorial covering texturing and lighting in 3d studio MAX R4. This first part will concentrate on lighting and rendering, while the second part will cover texturing utilizing MAX's procedural textures.

The lighting process in 3D Studio MAX has become much improved the last year, with many new renderers that have overflown the market.
These new renderers take advantage of fancy lighting simulations with lightbouncing calculations to properly light a scene.

However, these renderers are not flawless... they cost money. The few people that have money to buy these renderers, go away. The rest of you...

Max's scanline renderer is in my humble opinion, highly underrated. Blazingly fast and is capable of producing some great renders as long as you know how to use it.
I've talked to a few people about this and the common opinion to the reason why people go "hey, that's a crappy 3d studio MAX render, right?", seem to be the
"plastic" look and feel of the renders.

From now on, in the tutorial, I will refer to this look as the BS, or Bryce Syndrome, or BullShit...

The BS uses the standard settings for all things concerning rendering in MAX. I will try to break down the different reasons to why this look the way it does,
and how to bypass this... starting with the lighting.

Lighting

This part will cover outdoor lighting, but the same technique can be used for indoor scenes...To understand the way light behaves in a real world situation. I can recommend the book "Digital Lighting & Rendering" published by New Riders Publishing.

I will begin by showing a standard rendering from MAX. All I did in this render was the model, added one directional light with shadowbox checked, and pressed Render. The scene file is available: lighting.zip.

Lets start to light things up a bit. The fancy renderers I talked about earlier simulates the way light behaves in the real world. We will now simulate a simulation of the real thing... huh? Wait, you'll understand.... if you already do, just ignore my newbie-helping comments.